When Dr. Maxine Roberts helped to start the Liberty LEADS college prep program at Bank Street College of Education, she noticed that too often students of color were admitted to top schools, but when they got there, they struggled.
She saw herself in her students.
“The students who I worked with were me,” Roberts said, “bright students who worked hard, studied, all of that, and then got to college and struggled in different ways … I’d grown up believing and hearing if you just work hard, if you just go to school, if you just get good grades, it’ll all work out.”
But after over a decade with Liberty LEADS, she saw that “in many different scenarios that wasn’t the case” and was “left wondering, what is happening? Especially because for many of our students, the struggles were not academic, so something else was at play.”
That question led her down her current career path, where she focuses on how to remove barriers to success for students of color. Roberts went on to earn her Ph.D. from the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, where she studied Black student success in developmental math at community colleges, using an assets-based approach.
Now she serves as the new director of Strong Start to Finish, an initiative of the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan nonprofit that supports state lawmakers in developing education policy. Roberts spent two years in other roles at Strong Start to Finish before taking the helm earlier this month.
Strong Start to Finish is a network dedicated to higher education equity, with a focus on what practices and policies help diverse students thrive in their initial year of college. In particular, the initiative is taking a hard look at remedial education.
